CAIRN, a round or conical heap of stones erected as a sepulchral monu ment. They are found on the hills of England, Wales, and Scotland, and some have assigned to them a peculiar char acter, as receptacles for the bodies of criminals burnt in the wicker images of the Druids, etc. According to some an tiquaries, cairn is distinct from carnedd, the Welsh name for heaps of stones on the tops of high mountains (Carnedd David, Carnedd Llewellyn, etc.), which capital of modern Egypt, situated in a sandy plain between the right bank of the Nile and the ridge of Mokattam, near the point of the delta of the Nile. The most remarkable buildings in the city are its minarets and mosques. The minarets are the most beautiful of any in the Levant, of a prodigious height, and built of alternate layers of red and white stone. The most ancient of ail the minarets is that attached to the great mosque of Sultan Tayloon. This mosque was built in the year of the Hegira 265 (879 A. D.) before the foun dation of the city, and consists of an immense cloister or arcade built on pointed arches, being the earliest extant in that form.
The city proper is built on the slope of one of the lowest ridges of the Jebel Mokattam, and is surrounded, N. and E., by old walls, and the highest part of the ridge is occupied by a citadel com manded by forts on the mokattam, and containing the palace of the viceroy, the arsenal, mint, public offices, and the magnificent new mosque of Mehemet Ali. The city is separated from its suburbs Bulak and Masr-el-Atiqa by a series of gardens and plantations, chief of which is the Ezbekiah. Bulak, the port of Cairo, is connected with it by a railway; it was built in 1313 on land deposited by the river. At Bulak is the celebrated museum of antiquities, an un are said to have been sacrificial. Some cairns are undoubtedly sepulchral. In common language, a cairn is distin guished from a barrow, the former being a heap of stones, the latter a mound of earth; but in all probability they had for the most part the same object, and the difference of materials was merely occasioned by local circumstances.